Trolley 490

Picked up from a new location, behind the Co-op more or less opposite the railway station. A shop I have used in the past, but not very often. I suppose because I have our Costcutter on this way home, better stocked and nearer home (from the point of view of carrying shopping).

Returned to the stacks at the M&S food hall, where I found a gentlemen trying valiantly to get his small trolley into the large trolley stack. After about three goes he worked out that he had a small trolley. A mistake that I make often enough myself and, in any case, better not to intervene. Might be mistaken for a bizee.

Nearer home, I had been about to discard my Maltese paperback, from the platform library at Raynes Park, when I though a snap was in order - my only prior experience of the Maltese being a chap at LSE who made quite a good thing out of being in the Territorials (or some such thing) and who thought that the English were disgracefully unpatriotic - not to say disloyal - about their own country. At the time, I put this down to the nationalism of a small and relatively new country - new in the sense of now being independent of the Normans, the Brits or anyone else.

A small paperback, less than a hundred pages, in fairly large type. Twenty short chapters, unusually using one of maybe four or five different fonts. Books published for consumption here generally content themselves with just one. It also includes, towards the end, a scrapbook section of colour pictures, of about a dozen pages, sold sealed. I suspect some kind of teen romance, but it is hard to be sure - despite the light sprinkling of English words through the text. I am reminded that small languages might be interesting, but they are apt to be short of modern vocabulary and publishers of books in main stream languages are not going to bother to translate into a small language. Lots of books to be found in any branch of Waterstones are not going to make the cut. And if you are a budding neurologist, the standard text at reference 5 is unlikely to be available in anything other than English. The cost of producing such a book is forbidding enough, without having to translate it.

While the author of this book, to be found at reference 2, seems to describe himself as author and illustrator, and has a good number of books to his credit. A lot of them look to be children's books, although it is had to be sure, given that the site is in Maltese.

The publisher is to be found at references 3 and 4. A publisher which looks, from small beginnings in the 1960's, has grown into a serious operation, specialising in books for schools and books in Maltese. Google, to its credit, can cope with addresses in Maltese, coming up with the snap above.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/trolley-489.html.

Reference 2: http://www.trevorzahra.com/.

Reference 3: https://merlinpublishers.com/. To be found in Mountbatten Street.

Reference 4: https://merlinpublishers.com/history/. This section is in English.

Reference 5: Principles of Neural Science - Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell - 2000.